It may have been the delirium of being woken up several times in the night by a crying newborn, or it might have been just normal run-of-the-mill delirium, but if I’m not mistaken Matt Lauer started off the 07:00 hour of the Today Show with a line about the Administration playing the “name game” with regards to the NSA “domestic spying” story. My memory is hazy and the Today site doesn’t seem to have a link to the story in question, but if I have it right the point was that GW and crew was trying to pull a fast one by saying “domestic spying” was really “terrorist monitoring” or something along those lines.
My question to Mr. Lauer is, “If the program is about monitoring terrorists or suspected terrorists or terrorist supporters in the US, who exactly is playing word games?”
After a cup of coffee and a diaper change (the baby, not me) I find this headline in the Washington Post:
Campaign To Justify Spying Intensifies
. . . and if you go back farther there is this:
Administration Paper Defends Spy Program
Not to pick on the Post, as I am sure I could find more examples from other outlets, but duty calls. The point is that in my mind – simple as it is – we’ve already got all the justification we need to do what is necessary to keep this nation and its citizens safe:
For all the fans of the name game: If you don’t want more of the above – the end result of us not being able to monitor terrorists in the US – how would you propose we deploy our intelligence services and their capabilities in the info age?
